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Stegner’s Complaint

By Timothy Egan February 18, 2009 10:00 pmFebruary 18, 2009 10:00 pm

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Wednesday was the centennial of Wallace Stegner, the writer and uber-citizen of the West. His friends said he looked like God ought to look, and perhaps not since Eden was first sketched in Genesis has an author been so sternly rhapsodic about the land.

Were Stegner around this week to blow out the 100 candles on his birthday cake, it’s likely he would still be mad at the East Coast Media Conspiracy, and by that he meant this newspaper.

Wallace Stegner.

“It was The New York Times that broke his heart,” said Nancy Packer, a retired professor of English at Stanford, who knew Stegner well in the time he nurtured writers from Ken Kesey to Larry McMurtry here on the Farm, as the university is known.
Stegner won the National Book Award for “The Spectator Bird,” which The Times never reviewed. He also won a Pulitzer for his best-loved novel, “Angle of Repose,” which the paper only noticed after the award, and then with a sniff.

Even in anointing him the dean of Western writers, The Times couldn’t get his name right, calling him “William” Stegner. He died in 1993 at the age of 84.

Living and writing in the West, Stegner wrote, left him with the feeling that “I gradually receded over the horizon and disappeared.”

The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite -– those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber.

Norman Maclean, the Montana native whose gin-clear prose makes “A River Runs Through It” an American treasure, certainly carried some of the Stegnarian chip on his Western shoulder.

After the success of his first book, Maclean was approached in 1981 by an editor at Knopf publishing, which had rejected the novel but was eager to take on his next project. Maclean wrote back in compacted fury.

“If the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I were the sole surviving author,” Maclean wrote, “that would mark the end of the world of books.”

Stegner felt similarly dissed, but he’s aged well — everywhere, perhaps, but Manhattan and Stanford, the cradle of the creative writing program he started.

I asked Tobias Wolff, the author of “This Boy’s Life,” and a former Stegner fellow who teaches at Stanford, if there was a class here devoted to his canon. After all, he wrote 35 books — novels, histories, short stories — and is the subject of two lengthy biographies, including Philip Fradkin’s recent tome, published by Knopf.

Wolff shook his head. “Generally, students don’t read him here,” he said. “I wish they would.”

Everywhere else, though, Stegner has grown in stature. For starters, there are rivers undammed, desert vistas unspoiled and forests uncut in the wondrous West because of his pen.

He influenced several presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, to see that “something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” as he wrote.

How many writers of fiction can make that claim?

All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce work that follows his life theme: an attempt to get Westerners to make peace with their surroundings.

His prose was never Hallmark, and he was often blunt.

“The West is politically reactionary and exploitive: admit it,” he said in an interview. “The West as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The West is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.”

This product of the hardscrabble, boom-and-bust, wandering man frontier — his dad made a living playing poker and selling bootleg liquor one year — has given us two of the most famous lines about the West. Both are grounded in optimism.

He called the West “the geography of hope,” despite many misgivings, and he dreamed of a day when Westerners would fashion “a society to match the scenery.”

Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.

And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.

On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”

I fell in love with Stegner’s writing after reading ‘Crossing to Safety.’ I live near where Stegner did, and I’m constantly arrested by all the beauty here. Reading him makes it come even more alive for me, and I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet him when he was still alive.

I’m an MFA student, and most of my very well-read peers have never read of him; some haven’t even heard of him. It’s such a pity, because there’s so much a writer can learn from him.

I take your point, and I am fond of some of Stegner’s work, but I also think that every writer in America could make the case that he or she is a bit ignored or underrated or misapprehended. The land is big, and every vista looks different from every other. There is no spot in the US that epitomizes what it is to be American, and that is a wonderful thing about American literature. When I was growing up, it was all Faulkner and Fitzgerald, who made no sense to my young mind. The flip side of this “obscurity” is, for the reader, a repeated sense of discovery, not just of authors, but of places. That is our pleasure.

Kudos to you, Mr. Egan, for acknowledging this excellent but reliably dismissed writer. However, I have to say that the whole ‘we didn’t give Stegner his due’ thing seems like the literary equivalent of elitist white boy guilt. Just like white kids who grew up in Bushwick don’t seem to worry too much about their race’s past abuses, we westerners have always known Stegner for the patient thinker that he was, and never quite cared that the NYT ignored him—the Pulitzer and the National Book Award sorta made up for that anyway. Despite the odd Michener, even the folks on the frontier know good lit when they see it.

I’ve taught American Lit. at a variety of international high schools for over ten years. It has been essential for young Americans living abroad and non-Americans who attend these schools to fully understand the American experience; it cannot be done without teaching the literature of the American West. I don’t always need to teach Updike or Roth, but Stegner or McCarthy or Erdrich? Definitely. Isn’t it ironic that one of the great New Yorkers, Walt Whitman, could have such a powerful love of the entire country and celebrate it so forcefully; yet, today it seems others, like the Times, can’t share the wealth and the vision.

But perhaps instead of complaining about East Coast gatekeepers, we in the West could create our own respected and well-read journals, newspapers and magazines for Western authors and anyone else. For example, the best writer on food right now is surely Michael Pollen (“The Omnivor’s Dilemma”), a journalism professor at U.C. Berkeley — so why do I read him only in the NYT and the New Yorker (in addition to Penguin, also in New York)? Because writers want to be read by as many people as possible.

Sure, those East Coasters should recognize us more. But we need equivalent literary venues here in the West.

“All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce produce work that follows his life theme”

Perhaps Stegner is rolling over in his grave that even now the when the New York Times recognizes him, they can’t avoid typos.

Seriously though, Mr. Egan seems to know great writing, as he mentions many of the greats including Maclean and Wendell Berry. If you haven’t read Tobias Wolff’s short stories, you are missing out. Stegner truly is the dean of western writing. I have never read a bad Stegner novel and I have read most of them.

Stegner deserves better than this. Perhaps my favorite novel of all time is his “Crossing to Safety.” Stanford needs to give credence to the founder of its creative writing program, and the Times needs to recognize this foundational writer of the American West.

The Angle of Repose is my favorite book of all time. I believe I read it over 20 years ago and marveled at the character development. As an Easterner who has lived in Seattle for 25 years I too am aware of America’s split personality of so-called East coast sophistication and West coast genuineness. Although trained in the sciences, I had never really heard about the engineering term “angle of repose”. It would be interesting to learn how Stegner, as a creative writing instructor, came upon the term. The term relates to how high a pile of granular materials rise from the ground as a function of density, surface area and friction (answers.com). I remember one description in the book describing how a rock sliding down a mountain will stop at a certain point and come to rest, i.e. reach its point of equilibrium. Stegner was describing how humans find their own angle of repose in their jobs, locations and relationships. I have found that description of human endeavors to be as good as any I have heard.

That’s it? A man such as Stegner turns 100 and all the Times can muster is a snippet about how no one ever paid much attention to Mr. Stegner anyway. Although I dislike cliches, the more Times change, the more they stay the same.

In 1984, shortly after I began practicing water law, a fellow water attorney gave me Stegner’s “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” with the following words of encouragement inscribed: “I find this to be an excellent unveiling of the mystique of the west. Best wishes in your future battles with the water buffalos and the others who would perpetuate the myths of the land of Gilpin.” Since then, I’ve read other essays and novels by Wallace Stegner and I know of no writer who better articulated an ethic for living in and with the west (although Tony Hillerman, writing at a very different level, came close).

Thanks for remembering Stegner, my favorite writer and yes, my best-loved book is ‘Angle of Repose’. The hard times in ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ seem to be coming back to the suburbs of the West. Maybe things haven’t changed very much in 100 years, still all boom and bust.

I love the work of Wallace Stegner. I’ve read him steadily since college, grateful when his books were kept in print by University of Nebraska before they were reissued by Penguin. But I get awfully tired of hearing how neglected and ghettoized he was by the literary establishment. You want neglected, talk to African-American writers (with the exception of Toni Morrison), talk to gay and lesbian writers, talk to Latino writers. Other regions of American life are treated far worse than the West is.

Thank you, from a California native. I was first introduced to Stegner my junior year of high school when my English teacher made us read, “The Sense of Place,” which you quote at the end of the column. I’ll never forget that essay. It meant much more when I moved to New York state and left my home behind.

I respect Stegner, I just don’t reread him. He’s always there on the page, like Whitman and Emerson. Good company to be in, though I don’t reread them, either. There are few better writers, but many more engaging novelists. I can’t speak to the notion of an Eastern Establishment, but I’ve read widely. I’ve admired Stegner’s writing, but fiction, it seems to me, requires artifice as well as authenticity.

It may be, self-conscious authenticity is a feature of Western writing which I find most false, certainly when raised to the level of a nurtured grievance against all those Eastern writers who shut their ears against the traffic and create powerful works of imagination in their hovels, keeping out the cold by stuffing holes in windows and walls with old New York Times book reviews.

It’s a tragedy that people, particularly students, are not reading his work. He is one of the greatest of all time, and I consider Angle of Repose in the top 5 American novels catagory. And still the New York Times shrugs him off: the title of this section is “Outposts”, and the title of the Editorial is “Stegnar’s Complaint”, like he’s some kind of petulant backwater novelist crying for attention.
Shamefull.

We don’t need Manhattan or the Times to confirm the value of Wallace Stegner. It would be good if they gave him even half of the recognition he deserves. Just read his works. The joy of his prose and the rhythm of his words is enough.

I read “Angle of Repose” in high school, and the novel made me appreciate the Western landscape and lifestyle in an entirely new way. A truly nice piece commemorating one of the West’s (and America’s) greatest authors.

Having read a substantial (twelve) number of WS’s books, I feel confident in saying: a minor writer who has earned a footnote in literary history here and here but who deserves his obscurity. Why does Mr. Egan not consider that a writer of Stegner’s “stature” might not deserve that stature; or that the East Coast elite (so-called) wasn’t acting conspiratorially; or that choosing “authenticity over artifice” (as reductive and silly a phrase as I’ve ever heard) is somehow worth (aesthetically) celebrating?

Centennials are meant to be celebratory (or at least commemorative) occasions, yes. Mr. Egan demonstrates, however, that they can degenerate into an exercise of “Look how misprized X was! How misunderstood!” I’ve looked over Mr. Egan’s past columns in the light of this idiotic one, and come to conclusion that his his aesthetic principles are as confused as his taste is bad. This ia literary-cultural critic The Times wants us (well, me) to take seriously?!

I once dated a man who shared my love of reading. I liked him very miuct, but I was pretty sure he was not the one. One day, his friend drove him by my apartment, where he placed Wallace Stegner’s book “Crossing to Safety” at my front door without comment stealing away into the sunshine. (So he thought; some visiting friends saw him through the window! They razzed me no end…) Without another word or date between us, I took the book with me to visit family in California. By the time I had read to the middle, my heart , like the West I suppose, was won. We will celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary this fall, and have three amazing boys. A man who revered Wallace Stegner was a man I could share my life with. He remains my truest friend and love. Happy Birthday Wallace.

I have lived most of my life in SoCal, Tex first 16. And wish to live nowhere else. I do believe all of the things Mr Stenger said about the land and us, especially rootlessness. Believe that LATimes is the best paper for me, NYTimes, the best all around paper,especially for medical news and business (Nocera)((go away Mr Slim)), wpost, third. We went thru this financial crisis in 89,90 with Wall St bungling using mortgages being bundled and derivatives, no change, it really got us this time. The NY, Boston, DC crowd is not America-a poor imitation. Neither are west coasters- lala landers. Real America is in the middle of this country, the only authentic Americans. Thanks, Mr Stenger, happy birthday.

It is impressive to me that even Stegner’s “minor works,” such as Wolf Willow, resonate with me decades after I first read them. Not much else I read 40 or 50 years ago still is as fresh as this morning.

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Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. His column on American politics and life as seen from the West Coast appears here on Fridays. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America” and, most recently, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.” As of October 2013, Timothy Egan’s column can be found in a new location in the Opinion section »